Physicists “break the laws of nature.”

… Let’s hope Mother Nature didn’t have any traffic cops in the area. Yesterday, we mentioned that the Brookhaven National Laboratory had managed, under experimental conditions, to create temperatures of up to 4 trillion degrees Celsius. Apparently, in doing so they “briefly distorted the laws of physics”:

physicists have been accelerating gold nuclei around a 2.4-mile
underground ring to 99.995 percent of the speed of light and then
colliding them in an effort to melt protons and neutrons and free their
constituents — quarks and gluons. The goal has been a state of matter
called a quark-gluon plasma, which theorists believe existed when the
universe was only a microsecond old.

The departure from normal
physics manifested itself in the apparent ability of the briefly freed
quarks to tell right from left. That breaks one of the fundamental laws
of nature, known as parity, which requires that the laws of physics
remain unchanged if we view nature in a mirror.